“So this thing, it really will turn into a decent feature,” Sarah said. The editor in her had taken over. Sooner or later, it might occur to her that if these guys could kill one detective, they could just as easily kill another, particularly one I was hanging out with.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “What if they’d shown up at the store you guys were staking out?”

“I’m sure we’d have been fine,” I said. “Lawrence seems to know what he’s doing.”

“So they killed this Miles Diamond,” Sarah said. “Did they also rob the store?”

“Pretty much cleaned it out of Hugo Boss and Versace and—”

“It’s a ch sound. It doesn’t rhyme with ‘face.’ ”

“Okay, so I’m not familiar. It’s not the Gap.”

Sarah, in the middle of cutting off a Mustang, said, “Yeah, well, you haven’t even seen the inside of a Gap in years. You could use some sprucing up, some new clothes.”

“I sure won’t be buying them at Brentwood’s. It’s very expensive Italian suits, designer stuff, silk ties, you get the picture.”

“You’re right. That doesn’t sound like your kind of place.”

“It’s Lawrence’s, though. Nice dresser. Why do gay guys always dress better?”

Sarah scowled. “You might be surprised to learn that there are heterosexual men who know how to look good in clothes. Does he never go by Larry?”

“No. It’s Lawrence Jones, Private Eye.” I used my TV announcer voice.

“So, you got enough to write this piece? You’ve got color, there was the incident last night.”

“You promised me a week. I’m going back out with him tonight, this’ll be night three.”

Now Sarah looked apprehensive. “You’ve probably got enough already.”

“Look, don’t worry, I’m perfectly safe.”

At which point Sarah swerved from the middle to the inside lane to avoid a green Cutlass. “Jesus,” she said. “Was he going slow or what?”

Now Sarah was taking the off-ramp that would lead us down to the Metropolitan building. The ramp was designed as a single lane, but Sarah was trying to squeeze along the inside, so close to a Mazda that if she put her window down she could hand the guy a coffee. I kept jamming my right foot into the floorboards, figuring if I shoved hard enough I could stop the car. There were a lot of things that made me feel anxious.

I said, “Do we have any jazz CDs?”

“I hate jazz,” Sarah said. There wasn’t a CD player in the Toyota; it was too old to have come equipped with one. But at home, she often slipped a disc into the stereo. Rock, lots of seventies stuff, Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Why you asking about jazz?”

“No reason.”